The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  Of the Pierfranceschi there are surprisingly few surviving records. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco is a good example of known facts not adding up to a coherent portrait. He was tetchy, litigious and traitorous; he was also the patron of Botticelli and Ficino. Perhaps the most revealing fact as to his true character is that Ficino bequeathed to him his original copy of Plato’s Dialogues. I have done my best with these clashing ingredients, understanding full well that a love of philosophy does not, in itself, make a philosopher. I think that Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco had to struggle against his own nature and that Ficino, his tutor, was aware of it and tried to help.

  Cristoforo di Casale (or da Casalmaggiore) was arrested at the same time as the conspirators aiming to reinstate Piero de’ Medici. Under torture he confessed to poisoning Pico but, since confessions gained by the strappado are so unreliable, I have chosen to believe that Cristoforo was innocent.

  Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, Bernardo Rucellai, became the head of the Platonic Academy after the death of Ficino, but he also appears in the records as a shadowy figure behind the Compagnacci. This apparent contradiction of character was not something I was able to pursue and needs to be looked at. It would seem that my comments about Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco may also apply to Rucellai.

  Piero de’ Medici is another complex character and historians tend to treat him simply as a wretch. Certainly he was disliked in his own time and called ‘Piero the Fatuous’ by Florentines, in the sense, I presume, of ‘foolish’. But a fool can have good intentions and I believe Piero did have them. My own reading of the documentary evidence threw up something which, so far as I know, has struck no one else as odd: since Piero’s humiliating surrender to Charles VIII resulted in success, there appears to have been no need for the second deputation, other than to oust Piero. Charles VIII was sufficiently impressed with the young man to support his efforts in the following years to return to Florence. Piero’s decline into conspicuous decadence in the time he spent in exile was, I think, the consequence of self-loathing. Although the story led me in a different direction, I still think Piero is suspect in relation to some of the deaths, that of Pier Leoni and Poliziano among them.

  The Company of the Library is a plausible supposition: some association like it must surely have existed.5 The part that Tommaso played in the rescue of the books conflates with what was quite possibly the true story of Fra Zenobio Acciaiuoli. When in 1508 Cardinal Giovanni moved the Medici Library (preserved at San Marco) to Rome and enlarged the collection, Fra Zenobio became his librarian. Clement VII subsequently arranged for the library to return to Florence and, by a bull dated 15th December 1532, provided for its future security. He engaged Michelangelo to design the rooms in San Lorenzo where the library, the Biblioteca Laurenziana, remains today.

  John Colet gave his entire estate – while he was still alive – to the foundation and maintenance of St Paul’s School. Having dismissed Linacre’s Latin grammer as ‘too abstruse’, he set about writing one himself, calling on the help of William Lily. This became known as ‘Lily’s Grammar’ and formed the basis of classical teaching for more than three centuries. It is not known whether John Colet’s visit to Italy in 1496 included Florence. I have presumed that it did. There exist a few letters between Colet and Ficino, a correspondence in 1498 apparently inspired by Colet’s reading of Ficino’s works. What is clear from the letters is that each man recognised himself in the other, and expressed that recognition in ecstatic words of love, whether or not they had ever met in the flesh: a good instance of a meeting in angelic mind, which I have suggested with regard to Ficino and Pomponio Leto. The age was graced with master teachers in the wisdom tradition who, drawing on the same inner resource, were subtly and profoundly in touch with each other.

  As is now well-known, Shakespeare’s philosophy was largely founded on the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino. One book which had direct influence on him was an Italian work translated into English: The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione, in which the concluding speech, made by Pietro Bembo, extols platonic love the first time, I believe, between man and woman. The source for Romeo and Juliet was Giulietta e Romeo by Luigi da Porto, a story edited and published by Bembo.

  In 1508 Erasmus spent three months in the workshop of Aldus Manutius in Venice, overseeing the publication of his translation of Euripides and a new, enlarged edition of his Adages. In his colloquy Opulentia Sordida, we get a bitter portrait of his time spent with Aldus. Erasmus was clearly used to a more comfortable, less austere life. On the return journey to England he composed In Praise of Folly which he dedicated to More. The time he spent in Italy, during the papacy of Julius II, evidently taught him to appreciate the foibles of men and look on them with humour in the vein of ‘you have to laugh or else you would cry.’

  Venetian art of the period shows that an era ended in 1506 with a great, bravura display of old values. While Bellini was heralding the high Renaissance, while Titian worked as an apprentice to Giorgione, Carpaccio was painting a terrific series of panels depicting daily life in the city in a style belonging wholly to the previous century. 1506 – the year of Tommaso’s journey with Erasmus – was more than 1500 the year when one age became another. (The mention of ‘millennium’ in the text is taken from contemporary references: 1500 was the one-and-a-half millennium, the one-and-a-half time.)

  It may seem that I have contrived to bring famous men together, but I have been very careful with chronology and location. If, without contrivance, Tommaso happened to be in the same place as a famous sculptor, printer, painter or a German engraver, then I considered it my duty as a novelist to let them meet. One of the aims of the trilogy was to put history back together again, to plait the thread of lives that have been separated by historians, and to give the reader a context for so many famous characters too often viewed in isolation. In so doing, I have laid myself open to accusations of name-droppery but thankfully, according to at least one reviewer, have been found innocent of the charge. Nevertheless I was conscious of it particularly with the character of Dürer – was I being self-indulgent? Apart from anything else, one should never introduce new characters at the end of a work. However, every effort to cut him out failed: Dürer, and his practical Christianity, were fundamental to Tommaso’s ‘rebirth’. So he stayed and I am glad of it. Much more work needs to be done on this enigmatic man who stands in the line of transmission of ‘occult philosophy’ between Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa. I have been told that the ‘master of proportion’ he sought in Bologna was Luca Pacioli, and that the young, red-haired man in the famous portrait of Pacioli is Dürer. This is unsubstantiated.

  The essence of Renaissance philosophy is an understanding or recognition of the fundamental harmony of creation and the unity of Man and God. When I began this work, this philosophy in our own age was occult in that it was studied by few, not in secret but beyond the notice of the many. In the following three decades, I have seen it come out into the light, almost into general accept- ance. Our arts may not reflect it (if only because contemporary sacred art is occulted by popular decadence) but many of today’s visionaries would have been entirely at home in the Platonic Academy. As history shows, renaissances are brief and tend to occur when organised religion is weak. While I have been watching philosophy come out into the light, I have also watched the rise of fundamentalism, not only in Islam but also, and perhaps more worryingly, in Christianity. One can only hope that, when it comes to false prophets, we don’t have to wait for their fruit in order to know them for what they are. Our culture is in desperate need of Beauty: let her not be burnt, in some mistaken sense of piety, just as she is reborn.

  1. Juliana Hill Cotton, ‘Death and Politian’, Durham University Journal, vol. xlvi no. 3, 1954, appendix iii.

  2. A. Costa and G. Weber, ‘Le alterazioni morbose del sistema scleritico in Cosimo dei Medici il vecchio, in Piero il gottoso, in Lorenzo il magnifico, in Guiliano duca di Nemours’, Archo De Vecchi, 1955, 23:
1-69. (I understand that the exhumation of 49 members of the Medici family in 2004 did not include the body of Lorenzo.)

  3. ‘The Oration on the Dignity of Man’ has been translated by Elizabeth Forbes (E. Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, Phoenix, Chicago, 1948) and C. G. Wallis, P. J.W. Miller, D. Carmichael, New York/Indianapolis 1965. The latter includes ‘Heptaplus’.

  4. See Stephen Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486), pub. Arizona, 1998. Although there is now work being done to absolve Gianfrancesco of the crimes which many, particularly Farmer, have suggested, it remains that Pico’s life does not make a coherent whole unless his works were doctored after his death and the picture confused. Gianfrancesco’s portrait of his uncle as a pious Christian gives a distorted impression without the Cabalism. See Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in Elizabethan England.

  5. That the library’s preservation was due to Medici supporters is suggested in Berthold L. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence (Padua 1972).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Over the years I have been helped and encouraged by a great many people, all of them kind and generous. I would like to give particular thanks to Angela Voss, Pamela Tudor Craig, Tim Pears, Valery Rees, Clement and Juliet Salaman, Adrian Bertoluzzi, Jeremy Naydler, Noel Cobb, Arthur Farndell, Michael Shepherd and my dea-ex-machina Dr Carol Kidwell. It was Andy Green who pointed out to me that the three great paintings of Botticelli were hung together at the Villa Castello.

  Being a novelist is the least financially rewarding occupation there is, short of charitable work, but, like the Gangines mentioned by Pliny, I live off the scent of apples: many readers of the first two volumes have taken the trouble to write to me and those aromatic letters have been more sustaining than anything else, greater than gold in fact. So I would like to thank my appreciative readers wholeheartedly – you have sustained me throughout.

  Despite the size of my bibliography, there have been some works that I’ve consulted again and again for this last novel in the series. Stephen Farmer’s Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486), pub. Arizona, 1998, not only gives a translation of the theses but voices suspicion about the editorial work and motives of Gianfrancesco Pico, following in the vein of the seminal paper on the mystery of the multiple deaths of 1494 by Juliana Hill Cotton (Death and Politian, Durham University Journal vol. xlvi no. 3, 1954, especially Appendix II). The most expensive paperback I ever bought was Stanley Meltzoff ’s Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola, Theologia Poetica and painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano, Florence, 1987. It was worth every penny and is the only modern book I know of that not only deals justly with Poliziano but amplifies his reputation.

  As ever I am indebted to the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, their devoted translations of the letters of Marsilio Ficino, and their loving support in the duration of this project.

  Quotations from Dante have been taken from the Dorothy L. Sayers translations (Penguin). Quotations from the bible in the London sections (1 Cor 3 – 4 lines) come from The New Testament in Modern English by J.B. Phillips as, in my opinion, that work has the power and simplicity I would imagine Colet’s own translations to have had, given that he made his sermons in English. The lines from Poliziano’s epic Giuliano’s Joust come from The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, translated by David Quint, Massachusetts, 1979. Quotations from Savonarola’s sermons and texts come from Pasquale Villari’s Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola. Late on the scene have come Charles Fantazzi’s translation of Poliziano’s Silvae (Harvard, 2004) and Shane Butler’s translation of Poliziano’s letters (Harvard, 2006). Thankfully they confirmed rather than contradicted anything I’d already written, although the correspond- ence between Poliziano and Pico reveal a sweetness and humour in their relationship that I fear I have not done justice to. I believe that conversations in their circle would have been so funny that you would have cried with laughter, but it was beyond my powers to convey their erudite wit.

  That Botticelli’s Primavera could be an illustration of Dante’s ll Purgatorio I owe to Kathryn Lindskoog’s fascinating website (for the account of the moment of insight, see www.lindentree.org/ discovery.html).

  Lastly my thanks to my husband, David, always encouraging and supportive, even when I covered the walls of our landing with chronological charts and sat on the stairs tearing my hair out. He has not seemed to mind about sharing my heart with my characters, and is very forgiving of my more ditzy behaviour in the kitchen when writing is in full flow. Now he has his wife all to himself, at least until the next project comes along.

  THE BOTTICELLI TRILOGY

  Novels which offer a beguiling narrative while exploring the ambiguities of experience, the rich symbology of great art and the claims of the spiritual intellect are rare these days. Linda Proud’s historical novels stand up well beside those of Mary Renault, Zoe Oldenbourg and Marguerite Yourcenar.

  LINDSAY CLARKE, RESURGENCE.

  ‘… the most remarkable work I have ever read, such encyclopedic knowledge bubbling up effortlessly to create people, places, situations, dialogue, embellished with sharply observed vignettes of nature like decorated capitals in manuscripts. And so much thought on the meaning of life!’

  DR CAROL KIDWELL

  In recent decades, a number of highly regarded novels have been set in Tuscany. Perhaps the best known of these are by English writer Linda Proud, whose Botticelli trilogy – A Tabernacle for the Sun, Pallas and the Centaur and The Rebirth of Venus – is set in Renaissance Florence during the Pazzi Conspiracy, the Medici exile and the rise of Savonarola. The historical detail in all three is exemplary, and each is a cracking good read.

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  By the same author:

  A TABERNACLE FOR THE SUN

  (the first part of The Botticelli Trilogy)

  PALLAS AND THE CENTAUR

  (the second part of The Botticelli Trilogy)

  KNIGHTS OF THE GRAIL

  CONSIDER ENGLAND

  CHRISTIANITY – 2000 YEARS

  ICONS – A SACRED ART

  ANGELS

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Godstow Press

  (ISBN 978-0-9547367-6-7)

  eBook (ePub) ISBN 978-1-907651-12-0


  www.godstowpress.co.uk

  eBook 2016

  Copyright © 2008, 2016 by Linda Proud

  Version 1.0

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  Cover picture, Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, © 1990. Photo Scala, Florence - courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali